Free Passages: Welcome Home to Canada by Michael Ignatieff Page A

could stand tall. But here in Canada she is learning to be small, subservient, docile, to fit the society’sexpectations of an Asian woman. In the few months we have been here, she has not so much aged physically as withered inside, developed a stoop of her shoulders.
    As if my mother has sensed my thoughts over the phone, she says, “But this country
has
been good to us, you children in particular. All of you have done well. As for the medicine”—she
has
read my thoughts—“I might not have pursued it anyway. Your sister was only thirteen when we came here. If I was preoccupied with my career, who knows what trouble she might have got up to.”
    Yet my parents now go back to Sri Lanka for half the year, have bought a house there. They have returned to their first love. I wonder if my mother’s answers would be different if they had been unable to re-establish a partial life there, if they lived only with the raw nerve-endings-cut-off longing for it.
    After I put down the phone, I drift towards the kitchen, out through the patio doors and into the garden. My cat follows as we both go, trail-trail, through the grass. What I am trying so hard to remember are my first impressions of Canada. The truth of the matter is that when I think of myself as Iwas then, it is like looking at a person with one’s glasses off; there is a blurring of outlines, a smudge of features. It will be some time before I come back into my focus in my memory.
    I bend down to move aside a broken branch, the cat seizing the opportunity to run up rub herself against my hand, when suddenly, with a small “oh,” something rises in my mind.
    It is our second week in Canada. We are staying with my uncle in Richmond Hill. So far I have not ventured further than the nearby Hillcrest Mall. This will be my first trip downtown. My uncle is carefully going over the instructions he has written down. I struggle to pay attention. My hands in my pockets are slick with sweat; I can feel a coldness down the back of my neck. I am terrified that my uncle, my family, will ask where I am going, terrified that my voice will crack as I deliver the carefully practised lie. But everyone is too preoccupied with their own adjustments to this new country.
    When I finally leave my uncle’s house, I feel as if I am escaping a stifling room. I breathe deeply as I walk up the road to the bus stop. Part of me wants to turn back, to be released from this commitment, but afar sterner part keeps me going. I have waited too long to turn back.
    My adolescence in Sri Lanka was darkened by a shadow—a failure, I thought, within myself. While other boys would sit around bragging about their conquests with girls and fantasizing, I sat with them in silence, trying not to stare at the curve of their necks, the way their thighs flexed and strained against the thin cotton of their pants. The word “ponnaya” was dispensed with an upward curl of the lips, a fiery contempt in one’s eyes. I slowly came to realize that this word applied to a person like myself.
    Over the years of hiding these feelings, I gleaned enough knowledge to be aware that in the West things were a little better for someone like me. Coming to Canada held the promise of a great meeting with the one to whom I could say who I was. I don’t know why I thought of it as one person rather than a group.
    Now, for the first time, I am on a journey to look for him.
    My destination is the Royal Alexandra Theatre. A play called
Torch Song Trilogy
is running there. The waves this play is making in North America had reached me in Sri Lanka through
Time
magazine. It is an explicitly gay-themed work, where homosexualityis presented without apology, without obfuscation. I am sure I will find others like myself there, that somehow a connection will be made.
    Standing in the garden, I remember myself with sudden clarity, coming out of St. Andrew subway station, pausing in front of the glass-fronted Sun Life building, looking at myself